Page 28 of Spooked
The will that the lawyer read out was simple. Aunt Siobhan had inherited everything. To me, there was zero. I was left to venture out into the world alone with nothing behind me…
A stick strikes the ground. “I know you’re awake, Maeve. The doctors told me.”
I hadn’t realised I still had my eyes closed. I open them blearily.
“You shouldn’t have come back to Tucson. There’s nothing for you here.”
Fifteen years ago, she’d said something similar. Immediately after the funeral, she’d had no regrets at pushing me out of the house where both my mom and grandmother had taken their last breaths. I had had a few thousand dollars in a savings account my mom had set up for me, and had been paying into it regularly before cancer had taken her down. It was meant to have been my college fund, but I’d had to use it to get out of town and start out on my own.
Grieving and distraught, harbouring the feeling Siobhan had somehow bucked the system as there was no way in hell I’d expected my grandmother to have left her everything, and had given no thought to how I would survive, I took the first Greyhound bus with little care where it was heading. I’d just turned eighteen years old. Even if I had suspicions, how could I prove them? And young as I was, I knew I needed the funds that I had to survive, and not to use them to line lawyers’ pockets.
It was my knowledge of my grandmother that drove me to keep my head up and not to give up. She’d had nothing but used the assets she’d been born with to become a celebrated dancer. While I wasn’t looking for a man to raise me out of my predicament, I, too, had the urge to do anything I could to keep from going under. While I didn’t have the physique or skill that she had, no job was beneath me, and her hard-working ethic was ingrained in my psyche. I waited tables, flipped burgers, and cleaned more hotel rooms than I’d like to count. I paid my own way through college, earning a degree in business. In the end, I’d done alright for myself.
Until that night I’d had the dream.
Everyone sees things while they’re asleep, I know that. The mind plays tricks, mixing scenes and people from the long past with those from the present, sometimes so real you doubt yourself when you wake up. But that one had been different. Emerald, adorned in her famous peacock dress she’d always held onto, even though she’d been too old to wear it when I’d met her, had reached out across the decades, warning me, instructing me, to get back to Tucson and save her house. Or rather, something in it. But exactly what, she didn’t, or couldn’t divulge, as she faded back into the mists of time.
I’d woken with a start, but unlike other dreams which disappeared as soon as I faced the new day, this one stayed with me. My brain kept turning it over and over, unable to forget my grandmother’s face or wish to disobey the instruction she’d given me. It played on my mind so much that I was distracted at work.
I had vacation time owing. While acknowledging the stupidity of it, I booked a week off, believing only a visit to Tucson and the house where I’d lived after my mom had died would get the dream out of my head.
Tap. Tap. Tap tap.
I open my eyes.
“You’re back with me,” Siobhan states. “Stay with me, girl.” I’m a woman, thirty-three years old. Not long returned to the waking world, I don’t have the energy to correct her. But when she continues, in that annoying nasally tone of hers, “Try to concentrate.” I snap.
“I was badly injured in a car accident, and have only just come out of a coma. Forgive me if I can’t pay you the attention you want. Best you spit out what you want to say before I decide sleep’s more important.”
She bristles. I doubt anyone’s ever called her out on her behaviour. “Mind your manners,” she retorts, prodding at her coiffured hair that’s got so much spray on it, it doesn’t move. “I want to know why you’ve come back to Tucson. There’s nothing for you here.” She pauses a beat, but I don’t answer. How can I? How could I admit a dream brought me here? As to my desire to visit the house, it belongs to her, and I’ve no right to step one foot in it. Then she surprises me. “You had it right. Taking what money you had and getting out of here. That house is nothing but trouble. I couldn’t afford to live in it. No one wants to buy it. Now it’s structurally unsound, so my only option is probably to demolish it. Not that the land’s worth anything much.”
“When?” I ask sharply, her words bringing sudden clarity to my mind.
“As soon as possible.”
“I want to visit before it’s knocked down.” I can’t admit I’m driven to search for whatever my dream tells me is hidden. And there are those visions, dreams, and prescience that are nagging in the back of my mind, telling me in my coma that somehow I already visited the house. That can’t be true, but it cements my desire.
“Impossible. The place is condemned. You’d risk your life if you stepped inside.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOUND
Mouse holds me back when we approach the hospital room he’s discovered Maeve is in, as we hear voices from within. He places a finger to his lips.
“Impossible. The place is condemned. You’d risk your life if you stepped inside.” The speaker’s voice sounds elderly, both sharp and unpleasant. After a pause, she continues, “This whole trip was a waste of time. Look what happened to you. You should have left well alone and stayed where you came from.”
“I want to see the house, Siobhan,” a decidedly younger voice asks, and one,fuck it,that sounds familiar. My heart pounds. Crazy or clairvoyant? What the hell am I supposed to think? I brush those thoughts aside and concentrate on eavesdropping.
“Why now? You’ve had fifteen years to visit the place, yet you never came home.”
“Why have you held onto it all this time?” she counters. “Why let it fall to ruin, so the only option is to knock it down?”
“You think I haven’t tried to get rid of it before now?” the old woman hisses. “It’s the only thing of any value my mama left to me, but instead of setting me up for life, it’s been a millstone around my neck. I’ve tried to sell it, but there have been no buyers. And all the real estate agents have refused to have iton their books for one reason or another.” Her voice is getting angrier. “I even tried to burn it down, but the damn fire wouldn’t take.”
I catch Mouse’s eye and give him a meaningful nod to convey I’d seen the evidence of attempted arson with my own eyes.
“The only option I have is to raze that hateful place to the ground and try to make whatever bank I can on the land.”
